* ``transmeta`` creates one column for each language. Don't worry about needing new languages in the future, ``transmeta`` solves this problem for you.* If one field is ``null=False`` and doesn't have a default value, ``transmeta`` will create only one ``NOT NULL`` field, for the default language. Fields for other secondary languages will be nullable. Also, the primary language will be required in the admin app, while the other fields will be optional (with ``blank=True``). This was done so because the normal approach for content translation is first add content in the main language and later have translators translate into other languages.* You can use ``./manage.py syncdb`` to create database schema.

Playing in the python shell---------------------------

``transmeta`` creates one field for every available language for every translatable field defined in a model. Field names are suffixed with language short codes, e.g.: ``description_es``, ``description_en``, and so on. In addition it creates a ``field_name`` getter to retrieve the field value in the active language.

Let's play a bit in a python shell to best understand how this works::

If you need to add new languages to the existing ones you only need to change your settings.py and ask transmeta to sync the DB again. For example, to add French to our project, you need to add it to LANGUAGES in ``settings.py``::

Are you sure that you want to execute the previous SQL: (y/n) [n]: y Executing SQL...Done

What the hell this command does?

``sync_transmeta_db`` command not only creates new database columns for new translatable field... it copy data from old ``price`` field into one of languages, and that is why command ask you for destination language field for actual data. It's very important that the LANGUAGE_CODE and LANGUAGES (or TRANSMETA_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE, TRANSMETA_LANGUAGES) settings have good values.

This command also you can execute, when you want add a language to the site, or you want to change the default language in ``transmeta``. For this last case, you can define a variable in the settings file::

TRANSMETA_VALUE_DEFAULT = '---'

Admin integration-----------------

``transmeta`` transparently displays all translatable fields into the admin interface. This is easy because models have in fact many fields (one for each language).

Changing form fields in the admin is quite a common task, and ``transmeta`` includes the ``canonical_fieldname`` utility function to apply these changes for all language fields at once. It's better explained with an example::